That nuanced thrash-metal philosopher, Axl Rose, famously spent a decade trying to spit-glue together his Chinese Democracy album, an assault on the fictional nature of that concept.
Predictably, it was banned in China, spiritual home of the Staged One-Party-State News Event. North Korea may beg to differ, but I digress.
Here in Canada, between: the PM gettin' his freak on over heavy-handed message control, such that even most senior ministers are only allowed to read canned statements lashed together by half-smart li'l ReformaTory twerps in the PMO's rapidly-expanding Stephen Harper Information Torquing machine (The acronym says it all. But I digress again. To make up for not doing it last post, Ms. Zoom, ma'am...); Other ReformaTory twerps ginning up SunTV as a de facto party organ (heh...); And Immigration Minister Jason Kenney ordering his hapless civil servants to cobble up a, ummm, very special, immigration affirmation ceremony for his very special pals over at that self-same party organ, "And make it snappy!", we might seem to be well on our way toward a solidly domestic version of the Chinese democracy that it took Axl 10 years just to wrap his heavy-me(n)tal bandanna around and write about.
In maybe only a little more than half the time.
An overpowered media vehicle is doing its very best to impose a series of fictions about the current government's deeds, and the country as a whole, upon the mass consciousness. Those fictions, swallowed, would supplant something beautiful, real, and far more inconvenient and messy for current government inclinations.
The hilarity, for the rest of us, comes when that vehicle - inevitably - fishtails violently, busts loose, and screeches, upside-down, into the ditch. Witness the yuks when some StunTV (news?)weasel's brave statement, "Lets do it! We can fake the oath!" was dredged into the actual sunlight. Despite the best efforts of the PM and his gang to make the (real) media lie down, roll over, and beg, they apparently ain't cowed to the point where everybody can look away and ignore authoritarian absurdity.
In the spirit of fairness and balance, I should point out that the immigration minister has disavowed all knowledge. Cool. This has all sortsa well-worn precedent, established by both the fictional Secretary of the Impossible Mission Forces and the possibly-fictional minister's all-too-real spin doctors. Whenever a fiction-based scam goes sideways, the offishul playbook says to pile more fiction onto that sucker like crazy, then hoof somebody who isn't you under the bus. And self-righteously pretend to all and sundry that that little PMO-approved set piece dealt with it completely.
People, repeat after the coyote: "Repetition does not make an untrue thing, right!". Remembering that grouchy semi-mythical coyotes was born with their long pointy noses, where the minister appears to be growing his... as he speaks.
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